Your Career Homecoming is an Atlanta-based career coaching practice that helps high-achieving professionals navigate career transitions and pursue more fulfilling work. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Your Career Homecoming founder Laura Simms to learn more about her transition from acting to career coaching, the WHOLE Method, professional burnout, navigating career changes in the age of AI, and helping people build careers that better align with their values.
Laura Simms’ Background
When asked about her background, Simms shared:
My first career was as an actor, and that training still shapes how I work. It taught me to hear what a person isn’t saying, and to help someone find their own presence.
I studied at Furman University and UC Irvine. Over about fifteen years of coaching, I’ve worked with more than 450 clients, and I’m a Certified Equity-Centered Coach. I run my practice, Your Career Homecoming, out of Atlanta.
How The Idea For Your Career Homecoming Came Together
When asked how the idea for Your Career Homecoming originated, Simms explained:
It was born out of my own career crisis. I was an actor, and I’d gone all in: trained at a top MFA program, moved to LA, signed with an agent and manager, committed to it for the long haul.
Acting wasn’t just what I did. It was who I was. My identity, my community, my income, even my marriage came out of that world.
Then one day, on the set of a primetime show, on a day I should have loved, I had this quiet, unsettling thought: I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.
I tried to ignore it, because I knew that if I answered honestly, my whole life would change. It didn’t go away.
I spent about a year and a half in the wilderness. I scrolled job boards, did the exercises in five different career books, went to therapy, tried monetizing other passions. None of it fit, because I wasn’t just picking a new job. I was choosing a life while still meeting real-world needs.
The turn came from a single question that dropped into my head one day like a plane trailing a banner: what if it’s less about what you do and more about why you do it?
That reframed everything. It helped me build a career I love, and it became the foundation of what I teach now.
Once I’d figured out how to design a career that actually fit me, I wanted to turn that into a reliable process for other people. That became Your Career Homecoming.
The WHOLE Method And Career Coaching Services
When asked what working with Your Career Homecoming involves and who the coaching program is designed to help, Simms explained:
The heart of the work is my WHOLE Method, an eight-week program, and it’s built for a specific person: a high-achieving professional for whom the sensible resources just aren’t enough.
The career quizzes and résumé rewrites all assume the only question is what you can do. My clients are asking something bigger. They’re reassessing what kind of life they actually want, how they want to contribute, what matters most to them now.
So the work runs on two levels. There’s a strategic layer: identifying real options, choosing between them, and building a plan to get there.
And there’s a deeper, more personal layer, where we surface the old patterns and challenge the beliefs that have kept someone thinking small.
That second layer is what most career resources skip entirely, and it’s usually the thing standing between a smart person and a real decision.
Ultimately it’s a return to self. That’s why it’s called Your Career Homecoming. It’s about coming back to yourself.
Who Benefits Most From Career Coaching
When asked which professionals tend to benefit most from the practice and what circumstances bring them to coaching, Simms explained:
The person I help most is doing well on paper and privately unsure what they want anymore.
They’re accomplished and often senior, and they’ve lost track of what the point is.
Many describe feeling out of integrity, like their days no longer match the person they’ve become, and that gap is usually what brings them to me.
Common Misconceptions About Career Burnout
When asked about common misconceptions surrounding career burnout and the desire to leave a job despite being successful at it, Simms explained:
The biggest one is the assumption that being good at something means you’re meant to keep doing it. Competence and fit are not the same thing.
You can be excellent at a job that’s slowly draining you, and the excellence can keep you stuck, because everyone around you, sometimes including you, treats the success as proof you should stay.
The other misconception is that burnout is only about workload. Sometimes rest fixes it. But often the exhaustion comes from doing work that no longer means anything to you, and time off doesn’t fix that.
Navigating Career Changes In The Age Of AI
When asked about recent challenges in the employment landscape and how the practice helps professionals navigate them, Simms explained:
The pace of change, especially with AI reshaping roles, has a lot of people afraid to make any move at all, so they stay put in situations that are wearing them down.
Fear is running high right now. People don’t want to take a big risk, and they want certainty that their next move is the right one before they make it.
So part of what we do is help them get to a choice they feel sure about, which solves the problem in front of them now.
But the bigger picture is what I really care about. We teach people how to match what they have to offer with what the world actually needs.
That skill, knowing how to read a changing landscape and understand your own value in it, is the best job security there is.
Roles will keep shifting. Someone who knows how to navigate that isn’t at the mercy of it.
Favorite Memories From Career Coaching
When asked about her favorite moments from working with clients, Simms shared:
Some of my favorite moments come after the formal work is done, when I get to meet a client in person.
Sharing a hug, a laugh, a coffee, catching up on their life and the work they’re loving now.
There’s nothing like seeing someone thriving in their element and knowing our work together helped get them there.
Client Success Story: Finding A New Role In Healthcare
When asked about a client success story, Simms described helping a healthcare professional discover an alternative to leaving the industry entirely:
Some clients make dramatic 180-degree career changes. Others make a much smaller move that has just as much impact.
I think of a pediatric nurse practitioner who came to me certain she had to leave healthcare entirely.
By the end of our work together, she’d gotten specific: it wasn’t healthcare she needed to leave, it was the day-to-day of working directly with patients.
She pitched a new role to her hospital’s CEO as a patient advocate, and built the role and the program from scratch so she could better support patients during their time in the hospital.
She got a raise. She got better hours. She got work that makes an impact and feeds her soul.
Significant Career And Business Milestones
When asked about the milestones that stand out most from building the coaching practice, Simms shared:
My longevity, first of all. Fifteen years in this business, and the fact that I’ve kept evolving as the world and my clients’ needs have changed.
I’ve been the sole breadwinner for my family for about half that time, and I funded my own maternity leave.
And I’ve built a small but deeply invested team to share this work with.
What Differentiates The WHOLE Method From Traditional Career Coaching
When asked what makes the WHOLE Method different from other approaches to career coaching, Simms explained:
Most career coaching stops at strategy, the résumé and the job search. Most therapy goes deep but doesn’t build a plan. I work in the gap between them.
The WHOLE Method is genuinely structured, five steps over eight weeks, but it treats the emotional side of a career change as seriously as the strategic side, because you can’t out-strategize a decision you’re avoiding for emotional reasons.
My acting background matters here too. I help people show up as themselves, with their own voice, values, and power, rather than a polished version they think they’re supposed to perform.
And the work is equity-centered, so I pay attention to how identity and access shape someone’s options, not just their goals.
Future Goals For Your Career Homecoming
When asked about her future goals for the coaching practice, Simms emphasized expanding its impact while creating more opportunities for writing and speaking:
I love what we’re doing. I just want to do more of it.
Helping people who know they have gifts to share channel that into work that creates a bigger impact for the world and gives them more freedom, peace, and agency in their own lives.
I’d also love to free myself from some of the day-to-day operations so I can do more writing and speaking, and keep practicing what I preach.
Additional Advice For Professionals Considering Career Changes
When asked what else readers should know about navigating career uncertainty, Simms concluded:
If you’re doing well and still feel lost, you’re not alone.
I know it can feel discouraging when you’ve been out of touch with work that fits your own values and needs. But I’m here to tell you, from the other side, that it’s really nice over here.
You’re capable of more. You’re deserving of more. You have options.
